


Sansa the First of House Stark and Queen of Westeros

by Silberias



Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Because I studied history and couldn't help myself, F/M, Gen, Multi, for Lauren
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-03
Updated: 2013-12-03
Packaged: 2018-01-03 08:45:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,219
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1068444
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Silberias/pseuds/Silberias
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is literally like a history essay because I couldn't help myself. I'm sorry.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sansa the First of House Stark and Queen of Westeros

The succession during the War of the Kings is a difficult one to trace. Though there were as many as nine claimants to the throne after the death of Robert I Baratheon, there remains the fact that after a five year winter-long civil war there sat not a Baratheon, Martell, Tyrell, or even true Lannister on the throne of Westeros. Instead a woman, the first since the Targaryen dynasty’s rule over the Seven Kingdoms, sat unquestioned on the Iron Throne. Known as The Lion’s Lark and sometimes the Singing Queen, Westeros knew itself to be a queendom under her rule: Sansa Stark, Lady Wife to Lord Tyrion Lannister of Casterly Rock.

One of her first acts as Queen was to melt the Iron Throne down and instead forge a massive cage with a delicate chair within. Queens of the Stark dynasty for almost four hundred years and, after the Pinkmaiden Rebellion and the Last Song at the Stony Sept, the kings of the hundred-year-long Tully dynasty, would stand rather than sit. In a heated personal letter (on display in the Lion Lark Museum in Rosereach-upon-Mander), Queen Sansa wrote to a dismayed Willas Tyrell that she had seen many kings, lords, and ladies sit upon regal chairs and grow complacent in their comfort. She had too often taken that comfort of sitting idly by, and would instead command her successors to stand for their title—sitting only after abdication made it possible for them to lay aside their burdens. Clearly The Lion’s Lark was pet only in name to her Lannister goodfamily and had her own ideas of leadership (Maester Honton’s _Life of Lord Tywin Lannister_ , pg. 428).

Her reign was but three weeks old when she commissioned a Lorathi stonemason to begin work on a magnificent stone dais. Measuring eight feet long by five feet wide and rising to a height of three feet, anyone standing on the great rock could see every head in the great hall of the Queen, though it has since been removed to the Summer’s Rise National Museum. Carved on the face of it a wild-maned lion bows while a she-wolf howls to the moon, represented by a weirwood godsface—the she-wolf is displayed with one paw upon the lion’s head and one beneath the lion’s foot. The sides display friezes of iconic moments near the end of the Baratheon Interim, while six petite steps lead from the back of the stone to the platform. On each of these steps there are carved the sigils of houses which were destroyed for betrayal during the civil war—and a deep motif is carved on the platform itself so that only the Stark queens (and later Tully kings) ever saw it.

This motif stretched across all five feet of the platform and it depicts the murder of Lord Eddard Stark of Winterfell—from beginning, with the death of Lord Jon Arryn, to the end, with King Joffrey the Mad Baratheon holding the decapitated head of Lord Stark. Below it, just before the toes of the queen, is written _Let not stand the murder of the Just. Let not stand here any man brought here by Blood._ The meaning is ambiguous—did Queen Sansa mean “blood” such as the blood of her father? Did she think to prevent male inheritors attempting to stand in the space she and her husband planned for their daughter? For four hundred years the interpretation was the former, but during the Pinkmaiden Rebellion it was put forth that perhaps The Lion’s Lark had meant that no man descending from the Starks might stand as King but that this did not necessarily prevent a non-Stark male from claiming the crown. There are no surviving letters regarding the meaning of this, so whatever interpretation Sansa Stark and her children preferred they must have felt it to be quite obvious.

Meanwhile the melted throne, now a cage, existed as a perch for the Queen’s Songbird, the public jailing of the foremost traitor to the realm. It remains standing in the Red Keep as part of the castle tour when government is not in session. The first prisoner within this terrifying contraption was one Petyr Baelish, who had been relieved of his tongue and many of his teeth before his arrival in King’s Landing. Queen Sansa, as it may be assumed, enjoyed singing but it had also been used against her as a taunt for more years than she’d cared to bear. To imprison the Mockingbird without means to speak human language, she stridently made her opinion known on those who would sing selfish songs into her ear. According to the terse diary kept by the Commander of the City Watch during the beginning of her reign—Bronn Lannsword, Lord of Rosby—Baelish was only fed on days he made pleasing sounds to the Queen’s ear, and only bathed on days he kept ‘pleasant countenance.’ Neither happened often, judging by Lannsword’s amused words.

Though Queen Sansa is today known as a gentle queen, her treatment of her enemies was a potent mixture of stern Northern laws and harsh Lannister fulfillment. She was inarguably unyielding in both loyalty and reprimand, the latter all the worse after betrayal of trust. Westeros’ first true queen had learned, as is mentioned in the chapter on the Baratheon Interim, from both harsh teachers and from the one man who was as gentle with her as one might be with a dove. Tyrion Lannister, known as the Imp by his enemies, the Half Man by his armies, and Lord Consort to Queen Sansa, had ensured Sansa’s safety through much of the early part of the civil war. She seems to have trusted him implicitly.

The first Lord Consort is difficult to pin down in the historical record. He left many letters, but few diaries, and allowed others to mistake his stature for the state of his mind often. What _do_ remain are the songs. Queen Sansa delighted in singers, often inviting droves to sit before her and sing. On her name day celebrations she hosted ‘jousts of ballad and verse,’ where any singer in Westeros might sing before the court. It is through these songs that we know the personal lives of Queen Sansa and Lord Tyrion—and a woman most often called The Lion’s Linnet, his kept-woman whose name is listed sometimes as Shya, Shae, and occasionally Shael. “The Lark and the Lion sing not the Linnet’s name” was in common use to indicate a known secret by the time of Queen Tyriol’s reign (granddaughter of Queen Sansa), and first appears in song shortly after the death of Lord Tyrion.

Most would believe that after the betrayals of her youth (the Baratheon Interim and the Winter War), Queen Sansa might jealously guard her husband. This is not the case, as is easily seen by the placement of six teens being married into prominent houses—these children, called The Six Indigobirds, were the bastard children of Lord Tyrion and his mistress and were raised alongside his legitimate children by Queen Sansa. Maester Brissud, writing two hundred years after Sansa Stark’s death, speculated that the diminishment of the stigma of loved—but illegitimate—children began during the reign of the Singing Queen.

Whether this move was purely Sansa’s own will or on counsel of her husband we may never know without the proper original documents. What we do know, however, is that it is likely that Queen Sansa adopted her Literalism of Punishment codex of laws from her husband’s essays and speeches. In fact, her husband was the only person whose counsel she took alone, any other mouth opened to her would be within the sanctum of her Queen’s Council and any points would have to be hotly debated—more often than not, Queen Sansa would send all away save her husband, emerging hours later with a proper verdict. As mentioned before they left few letters to one another but the surrounding evidence points to a deep relationship if not also a very loving one. In a reign marked by references to birds and songs, there exist some very moving verses—most composed after Lord Tyrion’s death and Queen Sansa’s period of deep mourning—which make mention of the valiant Lord Consort’s treatment of his wife.

It was Lord Tyrion who led the last fight into King’s Landing, standing at the vanguard for his Queen—for even before she sat on the holy Targaryen throne she was lauded as Queen of Westeros—and the dwarf tore a bloody path before his wife. It was he who opened the doors to the great receiving hall deep within the Red Keep, gesturing wide to show her the bloody room that now belonged to her alone. There is also the symbolic Unwedding of the Lark, a song composed by a common singer that Queen Sansa heard  in the streets one day (Diaries of Bronn Lannsword, Lord of Rosby, vol. 3). The queen instituted this song as a solemn vow for whoever wished to marry her daughter, the beautiful Princess Rhyosa. This song, later vow taken by almost a dozen Lord Consorts, was based on the fact that before Lord Tyrion allowed his wife into the hall he begged her to kneel before him one last time.

When Lady Sansa Lannister knelt her body was wrapped up in a gray and white dress, the colors of her father’s house—she was heavily pregnant with her fifth child at this point, and she needed help getting to her knees. Across her shoulders was a blood red Lannister cloak. Her greatest humiliation had been her marriage to Tyrion, when she had had to kneel to be taken under his cloak of protection, and now before she sat on the Iron Throne she was asked to kneel again. Her husband pecked her lips with a kiss and then unfastened her cloak and laid it out across the threshold of the doorway.

With this action, Lord Tyrion Lannister in effect unwed his wife of almost a decade and then led her to the throne he had won for her. Before sitting on the cold iron, Maester Ubric recounts in his personal diaries, Queen Sansa paused and allowed her husband to hold her hands and kiss her distended belly. _Her smile lit the room like the so-recently returned summer sun, her Lannister-red hair loose and flowing down her back to her knees. The smile of the Half Man was just as merry, and I am sure I am not the only one humbled by the love I saw between a woman barely twenty and her husband twice her age._

There was new political ground broken upon the old Targaryen precedence of allowing Queens to rule with husband-consorts—except the Lion’s Lark put her considerable political power behind ensuring that the rules of succession would be wrested from men and given over to women. Queen Sansa not only broke new ground, she changed the foundations of the earth. It lay in an essay given to the Queen by her husband. Lord Tyrion argued that while the father of a child may never be proven—he pointed to the beginning of the civil war over a decade before—the _mother_ of a child can be made completely certain of. This snatched any ideas of the crown from the son, and eldest child, of Sansa Stark.

This eldest, Ser Stinnick Lannister, went on to become the Warden of the West and the Lord of Casterly Rock. He served as one of the two mighty fists that his younger sister Rhyosa would use to quell rebellions in Highgarden and Dorne. The other fist was Queen Sansa’s cousin, Edvan the second son of Edmure Tully—this cousin had inherited the North and with it Winterfell through his aunt. Edvan, it was rumored during Queen Rhyosa’s rule, was the father of little Princess Tiryamin but there is little evidence to support this supposition. Regarding Princesses Tyriol and Tiryamin: historians posit they were fathered by Ser Cayt of Tarth, given the numerous erotic letters written between Cayt and then-Princess Rhyosa. The Tartheen-Stark affair ended when Rhyosa birthed a set of twins, Stinnick and Eddard II whose father she did not allow to claim for his house. Where her brothers had been claimed by Lannister, she raised her sons as Starks under no other name. Had the Baratheon Interim’s most torrid ghosts come to haunt the infant dynasty—after all, Stinnick Lannister had hurriedly left the capitol soon after it was announced that the Queen was with child—or had a man with too-close ties to the royal blood-line fathered a pair of sons on the Queen?

No matter the paternity of the two Stark boys, Stinnick’s descendants at the Rock and Edvan’s at Winterfell were important supporters for many decades the queens standing in King’s Landing. Queen Rhyosa changed the name of the city as one of her last royal edicts to _Summer’s Rise_ ; erasing forever, she likely hoped, the notion of kings as the rulers of Westeros. She nearly succeeded, as the first great Tully Debates show an earnest dislike of the idea of calling Lord Aean Tully _King_ , preferring instead _Highest Lord Consort of Westeros_ in their early drafts of letters to the child-queen Sansa III Stark.


End file.
